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Wednesday, January 24, 2018

`Asservation Is Today the Rage'

Three of the
five newspapers I worked for are dead. The other two, owned by Gannett and
Hearst, have survived only by no longer resembling newspapers. I stopped
grieving a long time ago, though I’m amazed at the speed with which an
essential piece of culture for centuries, a way of life for writers and readers
alike, went moribund. I started work as a reporter just in time to learn how to
write, before editors (and readers, and most reporters) stopped caring. In the
seventies, symptoms of morbidity were already undeniable (not that I’m
suggesting there was ever a Golden Age), but I sure had a lot of fun. I think
of newspapers as my graduate school, just as Ishmael declared “a whale-ship was
my Yale College and my Harvard.” We were certainly kept as poor as grad students. One
year we got canned hams as Christmas bonuses, and were grateful.

The only
newspaper I continue to read with any regularity – in hard copy, I mean – is our folksy
neighborhood weekly. It survives by pretending it’s 1962, complete with what we used to call “chicken-dinner” news. I mean no condescension. I read it faithfully
every Thursday, even the ads. They publish a neighborhood police blotter. The
Mencken-esque photo of the columnist on the editorial page shows him with a
cigar in his mouth. They run a pet column called “Dear Tabby.” The writing can
be clunky and leans toward earnestness, but is never slick or trendy. A recent front-page
story documented the swarms of grackles, starlings and cowbirds that congregate
at twilight at a nearby intersection and shit on cars.

In his
introduction to The Dog’s Last Walk
(Bloomsbury, 2017), Howard Jacobson composes an epitaph for defunct newspapers:
“The shutting down of any serious newspaper is a small catastrophe.” He should
know. For eighteen years, the novelist wrote a column for The Independent, the British newspaper that folded in 2016 after
thirty years of publication. His latest book collects ninety-three of his
columns, which are unlike anything I’ve read in an American newspaper –
learned, bookish, clever, enormously funny and opinionated while remaining politically
non-aligned. Jacobson calls them “feuilletonistic,” referring to a form that has
never caught on in the U.S. His columns, composed with “ambitions to be impartial
and non-assertive,” are, he writes:

“. . . at
once popular and literary, serious without solemnity. Perhaps intimate in tone,
sometimes taking the form of fiction, eschewing dogma, at all times assuming a
shared disinterestedness in matters intellectual and stylistic, and therefore a
patient leisureliness – an absence of any hunger to have their own views
confirmed – on the part of readers.”

Sounds good,
doesn’t it? Sounds like the better blogs. I used to think blogs could supplant
what some journalists used to do, but I was young and foolish. The demise of
the Independent, Jacobson says, represents
“one more proof that we no longer read in the expansive, altruistically curious
manner we once did.” Jacobson is simply good company. He’s not out to change your
mind and he never panders:

“Asseveration
is today the rage: a passion to pronounce with certainty, to aver or declare if
you’re the writer; an impatience with discourse of any other sort if you’re the
reader. Irony, whose methodology is often slow and covert, finds little favour
in those channels of conversation which the social media have made possible.
The writer, literal-mindedly meaning what he says, stands and delivers,
whereupon the respondent, literal-mindedly believing him, gives the thumbs up
or thumbs down. If you happen to believe that most judgements worth making
occupy a hazy, indeterminate space somewhere between `like’ or `dislike,’ and
are in a perpetual state of being formed and reconsidered, you will find there
are few symbols on the Internet you can make use of.”

The least
interesting thing I can know about a writer or reader – about anyone, really –
are his or her opinions. There’s a pandemic of strident didacticism out there.
Jacobson’s columns are a nice quarantine away from all that, and I haven’t even
read past his introduction.